1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a composition for the cultivation of sophisticated bacteria, preferably of the genus Bartonella, and to a method for the cultivation of said bacteria.
2. Related Prior Art
The cultivation of sophisticated bacteria is a known problem of the microbiology and the medical diagnostics. The bacterium belonging to the genus Bartonella is such a sophisticated bacterium. Bartonella are important pathogens of the human and veterinary medicine. At the present time Bartonella henselae and Bartonella quintana are assumed being the most relevant Bartonella species being pathogenic for humans, which cause diseases such as the cat scratch disease, bacillary angiomatosis, trench fever and many others; cf. Dehio, C. (2005), Bartonella-host-cell interactions and vascular tumour formation. Nat. Rev. Microbiol. 3:621-631. Recently, new pathogens were described having an unclear epidemiology, e.g. Bartonella rochalimeae; cf. Eremeeva, M. E. et al. (2007), Bacteremia, fever and spenomegaly caused by a newly recognized Bartonella species. N. Engl. J. Med. 256:2381-2387. Bartonella spp., e.g. Bartonella henselae, Bartonella vinsonii subsp. berkhoffii, Bartonella schoenbuchiensis and many others can be found in a broad spectrum of mammalians, including cats, dogs, ruminant animals and rodents, which either suffer from these infections or act as asymptotic reservoir hosts for zoonoses.
It is known that bacteria of the genus Bartonella can only be cultivated very poorly. The diagnostics of Bartonella infections is therefore usually realized by the use of serological methods or by molecular methods, e.g. via the amplification of the 16S rDNA; cf. Centers of Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) (1999), Serodiagnosis of Emerging Infectious Diseases: Bartonella and Ehrlichia Infections (course manual), and Dauga, C. et al. (1996), Identification of Bartonella henselae and B. quintana 16s rDNA sequences by branch-, genus- and species-specific amplification. J. Med. Microbiol. 45:192-199.
Bartonella spp. are usually cultivated by using highly supplemented blood agar, e.g. chocolate agar, sheep blood agar or boiled blood agar. The use of these agars has the disadvantage that the incubation times are very long, namely up to 45 days, resulting in contamination problems; cf. Maurin, M. (1994), Isolation and characterization by immunofluorescence, sodium dodecyl sulfate-polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis, western blot, restriction fragment length polymorphism-PCR, 16S rRNA gene sequencing, and pulsed-field gel electrophoresis of Rochalimaea quintana from a patient with bacillary angiomatosis. J. Clin. Microbiol. 32:1166-1171. Until to this day the slow growth on solid agar based media limits experiments for the molecular analysis of the pathogenity of Bartonella henselae. 
In the WO 03/012058 a medium for the cultivation of sophisticated microorganisms, such as Bartonella spp., is described. This medium, however, has also the disadvantage that the microorganisms only show a very slow growth. In addition, the medium consists of 20 individual substances making the production very complicated and susceptible to faults. The medium requires the addition of sheep blood making the suspension cloudy and, therefore, does not allow the evaluation of the optical density. The use of this medium within the context of an automated measuring of the growth of the sophisticated bacteria is, therefore, hardly possible, since this measuring is generally based on the acquisition of the optical densities of the cultures. Therefore, a corresponding limitation exists for examinations on the sensitivity of the sophisticated bacteria against antibiotics since here in the most cases optical measurings are performed as well.